In modern times, information has become an extremely valuable commodity. Before the widespread use of computers, people commonly relied on television, radio, and periodicals such as newspapers as a main source of information about topics of all kinds. Even back then, the amount of information that a person received from these sources was too much for that person to retain without some type of assistance. For example, someone wanting to remember information from a newspaper article might clip out the article and place it aside or circle it for future reference.
With the widespread use of computer technology, particularly as it relates to the Internet, people now have easy access to seemingly unlimited amounts of information concerning any topic. People can now use the Internet to quickly learn about any topic they choose. If a person wants to use information found on the Internet for future reference, he or she may save its Internet address or bookmark its Internet page.
One important aspect of utilizing the saved information is monitoring that information to see if and when it changes so that a particular action may be taken. A shopper may wish to monitor advertisements for certain products and to be alerted, i.e., notified, when they go on sale. The shopper may then consider purchasing those products. Moreover, the shopper may only want to be alerted if the price of the selected item satisfies certain conditions, e.g., the price drops by 20%. A concertgoer may wish to be notified if changes are made to the published program. The examples of why someone may wish to monitor changes in information are countless.
One often cited advantage of the “regular” Internet is that it makes a large amount of information easily accessible through the use of computers and other end user devices. Because change is an integral aspect of information, it would be tremendously useful to also have a “differential Internet” or a “differential web” that allows consumers to just as easily browse and navigate through the changes that occur in the underlying Internet or web (and, since many on-line databases now provide web front ends, the same applies to databases as well).
However, the systems and methods in the prior art capable of monitoring information in databases or on Internet sites for changes to that information are severely limited in their functionality. Only certain types of information may be monitored and, generally speaking, only the database administrator, and not the end user, is notified of any changes that occur. Furthermore, the processes available for selecting the information to monitor are not satisfactory. To monitor most types of information on the Internet for changes, a user must periodically visit a particular website and visually check to see if the information has changed. This type of system is cumbersome, error-prone, tedious to use, and time-consuming. Accordingly, it would be desirable to remove any constraints on what information may be monitored on the Internet and to simplify the process for selecting the information to monitor.
The features and advantages of the present inventions will be explained in or will be apparent from the following description of the preferred embodiment considered together with the accompanying drawings.